No Brighter Sun
by InkPress
Summary: Ash loves Serena. Serena loves someone else. When Serena's childhood love leaves for Saffron City, Ash spends the next eight years offering his shoulder to cry on. But as Ash realizes he can't settle for friendship, Serena's love returns to Pallet Town, bringing the end of the world with him.


(A/N) Single parents, single parents, single parents everywhere. I wonder if all the fathers just decided not to care?

_**No Brighter Sun**_

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_Youth_

**Ash**

Gary and I throw handfuls of acorns by the roadside, mourning warmer days. Our plastic cages brim with the harvest of oak trees instead of the cicadas and beetles of the summer past.

Now we come to the corner of the brick school building and Gary kicks an acorn over the chain-link fence. He makes to kick another but stops dead, staring from the side-walk into Pallet Elementary's school yard. I catch up to him standing there and peer in past his shoulder.

A dozen bodies lie in the dirt around a boy. The bodies are the guy half of Ms. Gardner's sixth grade class, their lips cut open and their faces going black and blue. The boy is the sissy private school transfer who rocketed past everyone in the first race of the school year still wearing his Saffron Academy uniform. Now he stands brushing off his clothes, wearing the same face as he did turning to watch the losers sprint in after him from the finish.

One of the bodies groans. Big Mikey Miller, who won all of last year's races and who fills the girls' bags with crayfish: Big Mikey breathes dirt with his face pressed under the boy's patent leather shoe. He mumbles something and gets a heel smashed in his jaw and shuts up quick.

Gary's sprinting into the schoolyard. Gary tackles the boy and goes tumbling to the ground, their limbs tangling. The dull sound of flesh pounding flesh snaps my legs loose and I make it in time to keep Gary getting his head cracked open on the pavement.

Shirt fabric tears loose in my hands. A fist glances off my teeth. My head whips backward and my mouth floods with the taste of iron.

I shove him back and he stumbles over Gary, bright red trickling from his knuckles. Then-

_"Don't!"_

A girl emerges from behind the school steps, brandishing a dead branch.

"I'll hit you, Ash!" she says, her eyes welling with tears. "I will!"

This is Serena, who's received more crayfish from Big Mikey than anyone. Serena who I met at summer camp, who cried every day, who spent all summer with the boy and no one else planting seeds in fields choked with weeds.

I drop my fists to my sides, but Gary's getting up on his knees, pulling up to his feet. He's breathing like he wants to vomit but trying hard to make his face snarl.

"You're dead," he says, spitting blood.

"Stop it!" Serena shakes the stick at Gary. Then back at me. Then Gary again.

"So kill me," says the boy.

"NO." Serena runs in front of him waving her skinny arms. Her flailing snaps the dead wood in two but she goes on flailing.

"Let's go, Gary."

"You go. I'm going to _murder him."_

Gary shoves Serena and swings at the boy and misses. Then Gary's struck cleanly on the jaw and his face smacks dirt.

The boy turns to me.

I notice for the first time how similar we look. Except he's got Gary's blood smeared across his white shirt. Except he's got Serena clutching his arm. Except he's got Gary rolling and stumbling at his feet.

So I uncurl my fingers and hold up my hands.

And the boy says, "You're a coward."

I choke down my retort. I kneel by Gary crumpled on the ground and sling his arm over my shoulder. I drag him staggering off the schoolyard and at the threshold to the road I yell back at the boy, "If you hate it so much, just _leave_."

He's gone the next morning.

Gary and I walk into class and Serena's staring out the window holding her number two pencil like a sword.

Gary settles into the corner furthest from Serena. I hover halfway between them until Big Mikey limps in with half his face swollen up like a balloon. He goes straight for her so I follow after, my teeth clenched.

"Fuck off," she says.

Her face flushes scarlet. Her chest goes up and down in big, anxious breaths. She's young enough to think it's real big to tell us to fuck off. Maybe it is, because I turn around and skulk back over to Gary.

But Big Mikey lingers. He stands there beside her, staring vapid, until Serena jumps up and throws her pencil across the room and shoves him. All his considerable bulk goes tumbling into the desk behind him and Big Mikey lies there with his arm on the toppled desk and everyone staring: staring at the biggest kid in class looking up at the smallest, at Big Mikey picking himself up and waddling back to his seat muttering, "Sorry."

Serena sits down facing the window again, red-faced and trying not to cry.

All day I watch her watch nothing. All year, Serena talks to no one.

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I sprint past pyramids and tombs, skeletons and sculptures, modern walls hung with stone spears and swords pounded from bronze. I turn into the Art section where the walls aren't seen at all, hidden behind landscape paintings reaching floor to ceiling. I find her in the far corner of the room, wandering the tiled floor in her white canvas shoes. She sees me coming and settles into place with her arms crossed.

She says, "I'm not going back."

She's got that look. It comes with all the Valentines and free gum and love letters, from always sitting at the crowded table at lunch 'cause someone's always saved her seat. And maybe there's just a little thrift store pride in it too, the way she wears her second-hand hoodie like couture.

"You can't make me go back," she says. Then turns on her heel and makes for the pokemon exhibits, for the big charizard skeleton from the brochures with its teeth and wings and all.

"I'm _asking_ you to." I talk at her back, walking brisk to keep up with the legs she got last summer. They're long and skinny like the rest of her, and Serena stands whole centimeters now over everyone else in the sixth grade.

"If you're scared of getting in trouble," she says. "Just say you couldn't find me."

"I'm not scared!"

"Then what?" She stops in front of the charizard and touches the bronze plaque.

I say, "Even if you go out there-"

She walks away from me, picking a hallway at random. I chase after her.

I say, "Even if you go, it's not like you'll find him."

Now she parks in front of a dragonite fossil and runs her hand over the signage: _Donated by the Alden Foundation_. "Maybe I just wanna look," she says.

"What if you get lost? Hit by a car?"

She shrugs. "Would that make you cry?"

"Uh-"

"You didn't when he left." She sits down in a bench and stretches.

"That's not the same. I didn't know him."

"Well I did. So why can't I just look?"

She kicks her legs up and down. She puts her head back and stares at the fluorescent ceiling.

"Mr. Drummond said you've been here before," she says.

I give in to the soreness in my legs and sit down beside her. "Just once," I say.

"So you know the way out then." She snaps to her feet and grins. "Show me," she says.

She thrusts out her hand.

"We're going to see the city anyway," I say.

"We're going to see the _bus station_. I wanna see what _he_ sees."

She pulls me up and puts her face to mine. Her hands are warm. Her hair smells like oranges.

"Please?"

I can't look at her face so I look at her shoes. Bright white like they're brand-new, but I know it's the bleach 'cause I got mine from the same dinky shop for five bucks and a little haggling. I saw hers then, sitting on a stack of twenty other grungy knock-offs.

So I say to the shoes, "Okay."

We pass the charizard and dragonite and dozens more, all big and beautiful and dead. You don't get the same feeling with library books, the sense of scale. We don't stop, but I walk a little slower, stealing glances while Serena nudges me along.

She stops when we get to the stairs. She crosses her arms and looks at me like I'm conning her.

"Why are we going up?"

I start climbing. "Up or back. That's all I'm giving you."

On the fifth step I hear her patter up behind me, mumbling under her breath.

She keeps up a steady stream of complaints until we reach the top. When she sees the view, Serena goes silent.

"Saffron City," I say. I gesture toward the window with a magician's flourish.

Serena runs to the wall and presses up against the glass. She looks on at the concrete spires, the fashion billboards, the tiny strangers scurrying countless in the streets around the five-car pile-up outside the Silph Building. Then she puts her head to the window and cries.

Most girls turn ugly when they cry. Serena does too. She bawls with her face still pressed to the glass, her eyes going red and her nose streaming while I watch from the stairway. There's no way to look away. Neither of us can afford it.

On the ride home, Mr. Drummond seats us apart at the front of the bus. He stands between us in the aisle and lectures about safety and responsibility. He gives us both detention for a week.

I tell him it was my idea, so he gives me a month. Serena tells him he's getting fatter, so he gives her a month too.

Saffron recedes from view behind us. When it's gone completely Serena shifts in her seat and slides closer to me, just enough that the smell of her shampoo wafts across the aisle.

She says around Mr. Drummond's pant leg, "Next time I'm sure I'll see him." She smiles, Saffron still in her eyes. "Next time for sure."

I nod. I could cry, maybe, but that'd come off badly. So I nod, all the way back to Pallet.

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Pallet High's track circuit coughs up orange dust behind fourteen teenagers counting lap numbers in chirpy voices. The entire girls' basketball team minus one, the one being Serena stripping off her sweater, throwing it beside me on the bleachers, flashing Gary her fakest smile.

"We've got five minutes," she says, wiping sweat off her neck.

I tell her, "I can't go."

She drops the smile. Hands go to hips go to hair, her long blond stress-reliever, her masturbatory stroke-stroke. "Dr. Oak had you all week," she says. "What's so important you can't take a weekend?"

The girls make kissy faces as they run by. Gary returns a salvo of obscenities, making lewd thrusting motions at them until Serena kicks him in the leg.

"Look," Gary says, rubbing his shin. "You don't get to drag him to Saffron for the weekend unless you're screwing him. Which you're not."

"You're a pig," she says. "And you promised," she says to me.

"I'm really sorry."

"Don't apologize. She'll be thanking you in a week."

Gary limps to the edge of the track. He tries, as the girls come around, to swat the frontrunner's ass.

"Thanking you? Why?"

"I can't say yet."

Serena motions to her sports bag. "Since when is the professor's work a secret?" she asks.

I hand her a bottle filled with something neon. "It's just for a couple days."

She swigs it and chucks the bottle at Gary's head. She says, "Fine."

She sprints away.

Gary comes back to the bleachers rubbing his temple and throws me the sports drink. "She's not worth it," he says.

I suck on the plastic nozzle. The drink tastes like oranges.

"What are you gonna tell the professor?" I ask. "I know you still read his articles."

"Paleontology's your thing," says Gary. "I've got my priorities straight." He jerks his chin at the frontrunner, now second-place behind Serena.

"HEY MELODY, WANNA SEE A MOVIE TOMORROW?"

Melody gives him the finger.

The next day I'm listening to Melody and Gary make grunting animal noises under the bleachers. Serena's running wind-sprints alone on the orange track but she's pretending I don't exist so the grunting's all I've got for company.

Some freshmen walk by and I stomp on the bleachers to let Gary know. He just gets louder. One of them comes up for me, a blond twig of a girl with nearly pretty brown eyes. She approaches looking very conscious about the placement of her feet and halfway up asks, "What's that sound?"

I stomp the bleachers again. "Nothing. It's- raccoons?"

Melody moans. The girl tries to get a look under the seats.

"Alright, it's sex," I say. "They're having sex."

She goes stiff, her smile evening out in a line. "Oh."

Serena looks my way from the track. I stand and pull the girl up to my level, putting my arm around her shoulders.

"Don't worry about it," I tell her. "You're from the newspaper, right?"

The laminate ID hanging around her neck names her 'Melina Grove_'._ The newspaper club wears these like letterman jackets.

I realize right now looking at Melina's chest that my arm around her shoulders is too much contact.

"Katie said she'd be sending one of the freshman," I say. Serena's back to sprinting so I sit back down. "Sorry you got stuck with such a boring-"

"That's not it."

"-assignment. What?"

Melina sits down beside me. "I just wanted to talk to you," she says.

"Yeah, Katie said. You're covering the dance."

She shakes her head. "I'm _asking you_ to the dance."

"Oh."

The grunting noises fill the lapse. Melina laughs.

"I imagined something more climatic," she says.

"I'm just really busy with planning-"

"_At _the dance?"

"'Cause the punch has to be-"

"I think I deserve a straight rejection," she says.

I try very hard not to look at Serena. I say, "I'm holding out for someone."

The even line curves in a smile.

"I know," she says. "You're here every morning."

She gets up and walks down the bleachers. She takes a look at Gary between the seats on her way down before she joins her friends, laughing and waving good-bye to me.

Gary pops up at the bottom of the stairs fastening his belt.

"The hell was that?"

"Newspaper," I say. "About the dance."

"Oh right." He sticks his head back under the bleachers. "Hey Melody, you wanna go to Homecoming?"

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The next week, the punch is perfect. The trick is cherry sherbet mixed in right before serving so you're sure it's numbing cold. The trick is freezing whatever fruits you're using in whatever soda you're using in a big ring so no one's dealing with slices of lemon floating in their plastic cups.

So says Serena, who's actually in charge of the punch. She checks it right before the lights go down and people start trickling in, puts the spoon to her mouth over a paper napkin so she won't stain her bright-white dress. She smacks her lips and nods her head. Then she dumps in a flask of what's probably vodka.

"Don't tell anyone," she says. She presses the flask to my chest. "And give this to Gary."

She attaches to the gang of basketball players swaggering into the gym. She high-fives the tallest, Big Mikey Miller who grew six inches last summer and put up the same number of points in last week's game off put-backs (where you stand under the basket and toss someone's missed shot back in).

Mikey's talking about put-back number three, where he stood under the basket and tossed someone's missed shot back in, and I'm getting punched in the gut by a scrawny blond girl in a yellow dress who says, "Join the club."

I take the hand in my gut and pump it up and down. "Hey Melina!" I say.

"You're shouting, Ash."

"Sorry!" I let go of her hand. "The music's loud!"

She pulls me to the wall, smiling. She says, "Stop looking."

From across the room Mikey's talking about put-back number one, where he stood under the basket and tossed someone's missed shot back in.

"He's just going on and on about the put-backs."

"What else is a basketball center going to talk about?"

I shrug. "I dunno. Literature?"

"So talk to me about literature," she says.

"I don't read much."

She sips her punch. She crinkles her nose.

"That's the vodka."

"Great," she says. She raises her cup to me and drinks. "I'll booze my way through rejection."

"Uh, please don't."

"Come on, _wallow _with me." Melina leads me to the punch bowl and hands me a red plastic cup. "And I happen to know you read a lot."

"Not literature."

"Scientific literature counts too. You're on a very short list of people to have checked _Introduction to Paleobiology _out of the library." She pours Serena's punch into my cup. "It's just two people, actually. You should lead with that, she'll think it's interesting."

"No one thinks it's interesting. That's why no one's read the book."

"Come on. It'll be better than Mikey's put-backs."

Mikey across the room details put-back number two, where he stood under the basket and tossed his own missed shot back in.

"Hey," says Melina. "It's not like she's in love with him."

Serena's bright dress flashes on the periphery of my vision. Cherry red punch sloshes from plastic cups to the too-fast Top 40 music. The mash of bodies in the center of the room spills out to the corners and pulls back carrying Melina and me to the dance floor.

She says, "You _are_ interesting."

She says, "I'm rooting for you."

She says, "Go get her."

She pushes me at Serena. What she says after drowns in the noise, but I'm glad I don't hear.

I walk through the tangled bodies toward their white and gold center, Serena dancing with her hands in her hair. She takes drinks from smiling boys, shrugs easy, smiles easy, matching all their teenage heat with the advantage of her unmerited gifts. I approach playing the same damaged game, trading years of my life for this flushed moment of contact. My hand around her arm. Her blue eyes flashing.

She asks, "You wanna drink?"

I hold up my punch. "I have one."

"Not what I'm talking about." She shakes a half-empty water bottle. She whispers in my ear, "It's vodka."

Serena drinks from her bottle. She looks up at the lights.

"I have to tell you something," I say, talking at her pretty white neck.

"Drink first." She pours vodka in my cup and smiles, all her pretty white teeth shining.

"Serena-"

"Drink it! It's perfect, right? I made it, the punch."

"I'm not-"

"Drink it!"

She knocks my cup from my hand, and its cherry red contents go gushing down her side.

"Serena-"

"Don't," she says.

She observes her white dress bleeding soda and vodka and fruit mix and cherry sherbet. She drinks from her bottle, walks through the crowd and folds into a plastic chair by the wall.

Following after her, I realize that all these years have changed nothing.

"I'm really sorry."

"I said don't." She shifts in her seat to look at the red splotch. She looks up at me. "What do you want, Ash?"

I pull at the tie suddenly too tight around my neck. "It's what I couldn't tell you before."

"I'm not really interested in your work right now." She dabs at the red on her dress with a handful of napkins from the table beside her.

"It's not the work. It's who I'm working with."

"Ash, I don't-"

"He's here, Serena. He came down from Saffron tonight."

She stops dabbing. Stops breathing. I wonder if I should hope that all our years of sad longing will buy her the moment she's wishing for. I wonder if it's wrong that I don't.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she asks.

"I'm telling you now."

She snaps to her feet. Her warm hands clasp mine and her hair smells like oranges.

"Take me," she says. She's soft and sweet and so beautiful when she needs me. "Please," she says.

She looks at me, bleeding punch from her side.

So I say, "Okay."

* * *

><p>(AN) FYI, if your center is getting put-backs he's doing his job.


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